On Language; Invasion of the Arbs

By WILLIAM SAFIRE

Published: June 22, 1986

THE ARBS ARE MOV-ing in. No, I am not using a clipped version of ''labor arbitrators,'' nor trying to pronounce ''Arabs'' in a single syllable, nor clandestinely using the acronym for Angle Rate Bombing System.

The arbs are the arbitrageurs, who have taken the place of Bet-A-Million Gates in the corporate crapshoot. ''A call came in to Lehman Brothers from an arb and was transferred to me,'' said Dennis B. Levine to the Securities and Exchange Commission, before being charged with insider trading, ''. . . so the arb got on and said, 'Are you guys involved in Textron?' ''

The first use of this shortened locution I can find is in a glossary of takeover terminology in Business Week, May 16, 1977. The writer defined arbitrageurs as ''stock-market professionals who buy up huge quantities of a target's shares at prices below the takeover bid.'' (Arbs apparently ''buy up'' rather than merely buy.) This buying is encouraged by the group seeking to take over a company, because it puts large blocks of stock in the hands of short-term speculators; the arbs are usually the natural allies of the takeover crowd.

Curiously, the glossary used the short form - arb -only in passing, but the clip turned out to be as hardy as the whole word. Readers of this space bought at the low such phrases as poison pill (a device to make takeovers more difficult) and white knight (a friendly suitor who will guarantee nervous management platinum parachutes); in the past decade, other Wall Street nonce phrases have withered, such as gray knight (an opportunistic second bidder), smoking gun (a mistake by the shark that gives the target company a target of its own) and show stopper (a smoking gun the size of a cannon, such as an antitrust ruling that sends sharks and arbs scurrying).

Although arb is a noncontroversial clip, a donnybrook is shaping up over the spelling of the word it shortens. Arbitrageur is one of the more than 20 words in English with the French -eur suffix. We are all familiar with amateur, saboteur, liqueur and restaurateur (leave the n out of restaurateur), and some will even recall the conglomerateurs who used to make us all migraineurs; nobody is trying to Anglicize any of them.

But arbitrageur is under attack. In The New York Times, the spelling arbi-trager outnumbers its French counterpart 399 to 13. Why? Here's why: At The Times's news desk, in a list of dos and don'ts (one of which is to spell dos and don'ts without all those apostrophes), somebody once specified a preference for the Anglicized version. No special reason; no explanation; just one of those decisions that did not seem to be a big deal at the moment it was made.

I protest, appeal and demand a new hearing. Webster's New World Dictionary prefers the -eur suffix, taking the -er grudgingly. Over at Merriam-Webster, the unabridged Third New International (1961) preferred arbitrager, but that was typical of the anything-goes edition; the new, more sensible Ninth New Collegiate edition prefers arbitrageur. ''Since the Third,'' says Merriam-Webster editorial director Fred Mish, ''-eur has been cited almost 2 to 1 in preference, and is found in a much wider variety of sources. I think that -eur is clearly the preferred spelling.''

Yeah (not ''yea,'' or ''yeur''). I am fiercely nationalist to the point of jingoism, and can see the value in sometimes Anglicizing foreign words. When different alphabets are used, we must transliterate; that gives us the chance to clarify as we Anglicize, as in changing the Cyrillic kosmonavt to cosmonaut, or the Greek mekhane to machine. Sometimes we have to fix a borrowed word to conform to our tongues: the Portugese palavra, which calls for a nice rolling of the tongue, became our more familiar palaver.

But sometimes linguistic chauvinism asks too much. If we knock over arbitrageur for the assimilated arbitra-ger, can an insipid enterprener be far behind? How about sneaking around looking through the keyhole of a voyer? Will the arbitragers be driven to work by gum-chewing, bareheaded chauf-fers?

Come ye back to arbitrageur, and if the -eur is hard to pronounce, slang it up with arb. Otherwise, as Poe never said to Helen, ''Thy Naiad airs have brought me home/ To the glory that was Greece,/ And the grander that was Rome.'' Spaced-Out Precision ''PRECISION IS CLOSELY related to accuracy,'' write Herbert E. Meyer and Jill Meyer in their new book, ''How to Write,'' ''but it is not quite the same thing.'' (Why have husband-and-wife writing teams taken to repeating their last names? Why not ''Herbert E. and Jill Meyer''? Save space.)

The authors of this superb beginner's book on writing ($4.95 by mail, Storm King Press, Box 3566, Washington, D.C. 20007) offer this sentence to show how you can be accurate but vague: ''The first men to set foot on the moon landed there in the 1960's.'' To add precision, they suggest changing ''in the 1960's'' to ''on July 20, 1969.''

That reminds me of my most far-reaching grammatical error. A couple of months before the moonshot, a few of the speechwriters were sitting around the White House and noodling over what should go on the sign the astronauts would leave on the moon. ''Here men from planet Earth first landed on the moon'' had a nice ring of declarative precision, and ''We come in peace for all mankind'' was an upbeat message. (Pat Buchanan wanted to say ''Two Americans,'' but I thought that was too parochial; in retrospect, he was right.) But we had a problem: shouldn't there be some subtle plug for the Deity, not a religious pitch, but at least some reference to show future generations these men from planet Earth believed in God?

The solution: put the date of the landing on the plaque, and use A.D. - the initials of the Latin words anno Domini, ''in the year of our Lord.'' Brilliant. Low-key but definite. When NASA could not give us the exact date of the landing in time to cast a bronze plaque, I told the plaque-maker to go with ''July 1969, A.D.''

That's what sits on the moon today, to be seen by space travelers eons from now, and the only trouble is that it is wrong. When the date is before the birth of Christ, you write B.C. (or B.C.E., ''before Christian Era'') after the numerals; when the date is after Christ's birth, the letters come before. As the Random House College Dictionary puts it: ''From 20 B.C. to A.D. 50 is 70 years.''

In a century or so, I hope some descendant of mine will take a sharp stylus on some weekend rocket to the moon and, while awaiting a transfer rocket to Mars, will draw a little circle around the A.D. and put an arrow placing it in front of the word July. This will show that human beings in the early days of space were grammatically fallible; that mankind (since changed to humankind, but you can leave it the old way on the plaque, Junior) is forever editing, and that a little precision is a dangerous thing.